International organizations, policy experts, and nongovernmental organizations promote greater governmental transparency as a crucial reform to enhance accountability and curb corruption. Transparency is predicted to deter corruption in part by expanding the possibilities for public or societal accountability, that is, for citizens and citizen associations to monitor, scrutinize, and act to hold public office holders […] Read More

Abstract : The financial cost of corruption has recently been estimated at more than 5 per cent of global GDP. Yet, despite the widespread agreement that corruption is one of the most pressing policy challenges facing world leaders, it remains as widespread today, possibly even more so, as it was when concerted international attention began being […] Read More

There are growing calls for religion to be used in the fight against corruption based on theassumption that religious people are more concerned with ethics than the non-religious,despite the fact that many of the most corrupt countries in the world also rank highly in termsof religiosity. This paper looks at the evidence in the current […] Read More

This paper argues that religion influences the ways that people think and speak about corruption, typically leading to condemnation. However, it is also argued that, in a systemically corrupt country, such condemnation is unlikely to influence actual corrupt behaviour. Based on fieldwork in India, the paper finds that existing anti-corruption policies based on a principal-agent […] Read More

From Turkey to Egypt, Bulgaria to Ukraine, and Brazil to India, we witness the rise of an angry urban middle class protesting against what they see as fundamental corruption of their political regimes, perceived as predatory and inefficient. Corruption is near the top of all global protesters’ list of grievances – from the Occupy movement to the […] Read More

Why do some societies manage to control corruption so it manifests itself only occasionally, as an exception, while other societies do not and remain systemically corrupt? And is the superior performance of this first group of countries a result of what they do or of who they are? Most current anticorruption strategies presume the former, which is why institutions from […] Read More

Over the past couple of years, international law and international relations scholarship has shifted its focus from the question of whether human rights treaties bring any state-level improvements at all to investigations in the domestic context of the factors and dynamics influencing state compliance. In this direction, and focusing on the European Court of Human […] Read More

Why has the EU succeeded in promoting democracy in the new member states but failed in promoting good governance? This essay seeks to answer this question first by distinguishing governance from political regimes, and second by exploring to what extent national governance—which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that determine who […] Read More

Why have the third wave of democratisation and concurrent economic liberalisation, contrary to many expectations, failed to lower global corruption? This article comparatively assesses systemic corruption and other features of personal rule in Argentina, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, and Zambia. It finds that systemic corruption in these countries persists despite political transitions and economic […] Read More

Chr. Michelsen Institute (U4 Brief 2012:6) published an article of Claudia Baez Camargo, ANTICORRP researcher who is currently working at the Basel Institute on Governance. Abstract Power and influence analysis can be used to assess corruption vulnerabilities in the public sector. This approach helps identify powerful stakeholders that should be engaged to achieve maximum […] Read More